 Hello, I'm Omar Fernandez, Director of Strategy and Operations at GitLab and today I'm here with Gerben. Gerben, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do for work? Hi, yes, thank you. I'm a tech lead in a cybersecurity organization and my role is to guide the team to make the best technical decisions. Tell us a little bit about your history with GitLab. How did you first learn about GitLab? What were you looking for at the moment? It's been a while ago. I actually started using GitLab very early on in the process. I've worked for different organizations and every time there was always a need for a self-hosted Git platform. GitLab almost always fit the bill and most particularly we started using it in different projects because of the CI CD capabilities. What was the current state of affairs at work and how did things start changing as you started using GitLab? Most projects I started on usually had a very rigid system in place beforehand. It would always be a project that we could use something refreshing on. What was that need that you were trying to fulfill? The gap that GitLab fills for us was the developer freedom. It's developer focused so you're not hindered by the tool set and by the restrictions it places upon you. How does that feel for you? If you're forced to not use GitLab, how do you personally feel? When I don't have GitLab available to us in the project or in the company I feel restricted. GitLab allows you to not have a false sense of progress in the project. Give me an example of something that's tedious or boring or annoying without GitLab and how it changes when you use GitLab? Yeah, so one particular example I was in an organization and they each had their own departments responsible for it. They each had their own restrictions set upon them. So in order for us to get anything into production it could take up to two days to just deploy the code and get everything approved. When you end up with GitLab the flow of course became almost instant because you upload the pipeline manifest and there you go. Are there particular features within GitLab that get people comfortable with this? For me the power feature is the CI-CD integration. It allows for fast deployment, fast integration, it allows for fast check. So in projects where for example there's no static analysis yet, GitLab for me unifies it all in the same place so everyone is looking at the same code in the same direction with the same quality level. Tell me about how you feel when you're using GitLab or your transition from legacy tool processes into GitLab? I feel excited about it because you can get stuff moving, stuff can get automated, you're no longer stuck. It's always clear who's doing what when it happens. Even if something goes wrong it's always super super clear. Can you think of other ways in which maybe you've personally benefited from the adoption of GitLab or advocating for GitLab? Personally I've always benefited in the sense that it allows me to focus on the actual organizational questions. I'm a troubleshooter and GitLab just takes away the guesswork and allows me to focus on the actual issues that are there. Do you think that using or advocating for GitLab has great benefits in your career? If I benefited indirectly because I got to focus on actually solving issues my work would be desirable for future career opportunities. Are there other techniques or tactics that you use that make the process more fun and interesting? It's a creeping scope of improvement where every day you push for getting a button green and then after it pushes for a green pipeline, everything is green, you're no longer going to accept any less than that and the next morning you start increasing the bar again. It makes the teams more enjoyable because some teams get stuck in this situation where they are quabbling between you broke the pipeline or you broke the build or you broke production and it shifts to a positive stance where you go from who broke it to hey guys look I improved it. If you have even five minutes at the end of the day to improve the existing situation you're going to send people home with feeling better about themselves at the end of the day. Any other examples of something that because we do this I feel better or the team feels better that I really enjoy about my work when I'm using GitLab? In projects where we have direct customer interactions we like to also use GitLab because GitLab gives you a more direct mode of communication. You can say okay we fixed this issue with this particular line of code at that particular point in time and it takes away so much intermediate layers from communications with customers where it might go to an account manager or it might go through someone who might not understand the full context of things. It keeps everything in context. Thank you so much for taking the time today. Sure, no problem.